Tom de Freston

His writing is represented by the literary agent Harriet Moore at David Higham Associates. His debut work of narrative non-fiction, Wreck was published by Granta in 2022. His second narrative non-fiction book is forthcoming with Granta in March 2024. Julia and the Shark (2021, Hachette) in collaboration with his wife, Kiran Millwood Hargrave, was shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year and the Wainwright Prize for Children's Writing on Nature and Conservation. It won the inaugural Waterstones Children’s Gift of the year. In September 2022 their next collaboration, Leila and the Blue Fox will be published (Hachette).

Since 2016 he has been the artistic director of Medicine Unboxed. From 2016-17 he was the inaugural Creative Fellow at Birmingham University. In 2014 he held the Aldeburgh Lookout Tower residency as part of the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival. From 2013-2015 he was Artist in Residence from Medicine Unboxed. In 2012 he represented UK at World Event Young Artists 2012, Nottingham. In 2012 he was Artist in Residence, The Expansionists in Whitstable with Kiran Millwood Hargrave. In 2012 he held the Hatley Artist in Residence at the Centre for Recent Drawing (C4RD). From 2010-2011 he was a Leverhulme Artist in Residence, Cambridge University. From 2009 to 2011 he was Artist in Residence at The Leys in Cambridge. From 2008 to September 2009 he was the Levy Plumb Visual Arts Residency, Christ’s College Cambridge.

He started exhibiting professionally in 2008 and to date has had twenty-six solo shows. He was represented by Breese Little Gallery (London) from 2012 to 2016. He is currently represented by No20 arts, London. His debut solo show with No20 Arts was From Darkness, from March to July 2022. A monograph on de Freston’s work by the writer and academic Dr. Stephen Kenyon Owen is forthcoming with Gatehouse Press, 2024.

De Freston graduated from Cambridge University in 2007. His painterly, literary and stage projects are often collaborative and interdisciplinary, and frequently draw on literary, art historical, personal, and social sources and themes. Regular collaborators include his wife the writer Kiran Millwood Hargrave, the film maker Mark Jones (Unmarked Films), the writer and academic Professor Simon Palfrey and the academic Dr. Pablo de Orellana. Past and ongoing collaborative projects include I Saw This, Demons Land, Truthtellers, Poor Tom, Orpheus and Eurydice and Scavengers.

Tom de Freston (born May 23, 1983, London) is a visual artist and writer based in Oxford. His work is known for his focus on images of humanity, despair, that ‘convey our most haunted fears about a world struggling for survival’ (Richard Cork). His practice is dedicated to the construction of multimedia worlds, combining paintings, film, writing and performance into immersive visceral narratives.